Roots of Ecologytraces the history of ideas and observations about ecology from Plato and Aristotle down to Ernst Haeckel, who named and defined ecology in 1866. The earliest ecological idea was the balance of nature, beginning with Herodotus and Plato, but it was first named only in the early 1700s. Herodotus realized that predatory species have fewer offspring than do their prey species. Plato explained that all species have means of survival that prevent their extinction. Pliny, the Roman author of an encyclopedia entitled Naturalis historiae, included Greek botany, zoology, and geology und ... More

Roots of Ecologytraces the history of ideas and observations about ecology from Plato and Aristotle down to Ernst Haeckel, who named and defined ecology in 1866. The earliest ecological idea was the balance of nature, beginning with Herodotus and Plato, but it was first named only in the early 1700s. Herodotus realized that predatory species have fewer offspring than do their prey species. Plato explained that all species have means of survival that prevent their extinction. Pliny, the Roman author of an encyclopedia entitled Naturalis historiae, included Greek botany, zoology, and geology under that rubric, thus giving rise to a general environmental science that persisted until the end of the 1700s. In 1749, Linnaeus named a somewhat static ecological science, Oeconomia naturae, which extended the balance of nature to include plants. He described the succession of vegetation from bare rocks with lichens to forests. During the early 1800s, zoologists and botanists retained Linnaeus's idea of an economy of nature, but they discussed the possibility of species evolving and some becoming extinct—giving a dynamic dimension to Linnaeus's idea. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection transformed biological sciences, causing Haeckel to elevate ecology to a separate science.